the Separatism primer: the A.F.R.'s debut — terror as resentment over waste
The earliest unignorable strikes involved a then-unknown terrorist cell that apparently snuck down from the E.W.D.-blighted Papineau region at night and dragged huge standing mirrors across U.S. Interstate 87 at selected dangerous narrow winding Adirondack passes south of the border and its Lucite walls.
Context
The insurgency's first strikes read as geopolitics of resentment over waste: the cell comes "from the E.W.D.-blighted Papineau region," the blighting itself the motive, and its road-mirror ambushes on I-87 kill "military and O.N.A.N.ite personnel" near the Concavity. The escalation is the point the primer keeps circling — this is "ill will way worse than anything aroused by plain old historical Separatism," a qualitatively new anti-O.N.A.N. hatred born of the border policy, not the old secession quarrel.